Irish minister's comments on working mothers reveal a sexist ideology

'Taoiseach Enda Kenny... has claimed that no one will be forced to give up their job under the new personal insolvency scheme.' Photograph: Isopix/Rex Features
Isopix / Rex Features/Isopix / Rex Features

Pretend you're Irish. Yes, yes, I know Paddy's Day was two weeks ago, and you've only just managed to get the green gunk out of your hair, but humour me. So you're in the pub (of course) with your loved ones, and talk turns to the glut of mortgaged Irish families (more than 10%) who can't pay. Everyone has a story about someone they know, someone they care about. The government's new personal insolvency guidelines are still in draft form, but it's becoming clear that banks are going to have significant power to dictate how families' budgets can and should be spent. Particularly worrying are the guidelines on childcare.

Uncle Martín, with a few pints too many in him maybe, offers his observations on the childcare issue: "I know one or two women who probably don't make very much money at all from working but they do it to keep their position on the career ladder, if you like. […]I think if somebody is in that position whereby they're actually losing money, it's costing them money to work and as a result they can't pay their mortgage, well then that is something that needs to be taken into account in any kind of insolvency regime."

Your mammy tut-tuts. Your auntie Máire looks embarrassed. And even your brothers, usually good for an auld anti-feminist windup, decide not to partake in this particular bit of baiting. Eyes turn to you, the family equality windbag, to set Uncle Martín straight.

"Martín, Martín, Martín," you sigh, "would you ever go back to 1972? If two people enter into the partnership that is marriage and childrearing, and if one of those people decides to take a hit careerwise – working part-time to support and facilitate that partnership, working to maintain his or her skillset until the kiddies are big enough to let themselves in after school – then you need to look at the partnership as a whole." You grab a pen and start scribbling on a beer mat. "Look, it's very simple. Childcare is the responsibility of both parents, yes? Let X equal income and C equal childcare costs. In cases like the one you describe, the maths can't be (X1) + (X2 – C). That's completely unfair. It has to be (X1 + X2) – C or, alternatively, (X1 – C/2) + (X2 – C/2)."

Equations on beer mats are a great way to deal with misguided social theorists in the pub. Sadly, the words quoted above on Irish mothers' selfish attempts to cling on to their careers are not those of anyone's semi-sober uncle. They are the publicly stated opinion of Leo Varadkar, Ireland's minister for transport. But this is just another minister mouthing off, right? No one could actually try to force women whose salaries don't cover the cost of their household's childcare to stay at home, could they?

Here's an extract from the government's draft guidelines on insolvency: "Where a person is working and paying for childcare as a consequence of his or her employment, the cost of childcare should not exceed the income from employment."

I'm almost grateful to Uncle Martín, sorry, I mean TD Varadkar. Without his remarks, the ideology of these guidelines might have remained hidden behind gender neutral language for longer. After all, if you fail to clock the worrying implication that paying for childcare is a consequence of only one parent's employment, it might seem like common financial sense that working should earn, rather than cost, money.

While the guideline in question is gender neutral, our society is not. Of course, many men work part-time to support their families domestically, but this life choice remains predominantly a female prerogative. Varadkar's comments dispense with gender neutrality, and leave little doubt that the ideology behind the guidelines holds childcare to be a woman's responsibility. Women's careers are deemed luxuries, to be offered up alongside holidays, Sky Sports, and second cars under the new insolvency rubric. This makes economic sense only at the most myopic level. What logic can there be for women, many with state-funded tertiary educations, to be turfed out of the labour market?

Taoiseach Enda Kenny, ever good cop to Varadkar's bad, has claimed that no one will be forced to give up their job under the new personal insolvency scheme. Even if this is true, and the guideline above modified so that it can't be interpreted to allow for a working parent to be required to stay at home, the guidelines continue to allow banks to dictate the kind of childcare parents can pay for.

Much like the Croke Park II proposals, where the dismantling of flexitime arrangements was the straw that broke the backs of many mothers in the public sector, the necessity of leaving children with a childminder of the bank manager's choosing is likely to finally convince some women to climb down, defeated, from the career ladder.

The questions Varadkar should be taking into account are: why is childcare so expensive relative to household income? What can be done to end the economic imperative for skilled parents to leave the workforce? What can be done to capitalise on government investment in education and private-sector investment in training? In letting banks dictate insolvent families' childcare arrangements, the Irish government exposes the thinly veiled truth that, when it comes to women and work, its policies are based on sexist ideologies, not economic growth. Since 1973, no woman in Ireland has been legally required to give up paid employment by dint of her marital status. That's 40 years – a good innings, Varadkar?